There are a number of reasons why Oracle dominates the enterprise and will forever remain so.
One. The products are well understood. Not just from a technical perspective but operationally as well. Generally enterprise companies have dedicated DBAs either in house or on call. Two. There are unlimited support options. Three. Almost all enterprise software works with Oracle and many are only supported for use on Oracle.
You ARE seeing open source adoption in particular MongoDB, Cassandra in specific areas of the business. But they are almost exclusively "non-core business".
I spent some time last year at a bank setting up an Oracle DB that would replicate data from MongoDB, for reporting. The Oracle DB, once set up right, was considerably faster with the queries we wanted than MongoDB, and that was in between running massive imports. MongoDB was running on 6 big physical boxes with loads of RAM, while Oracle DB was only running on a single virtual machine using 16GB of RAM. The reason this worked was because of the wealth of Oracle knowledge out there, access to experienced DBAs with knowledge of good methods, etc. I found MongoDB to be a bit young in this sense, performance tips were down to 'change your schema' which is also true for Oracle but there are many ways to make Oracle work better with a legacy bad schema. That said Cassandra, MongoDB etc. seems to be taken up by the banks at a rapid pace, mainly for analysis tools e.g. in trading.
I'm interested in knowing how PyLadies applies their funds and how they do so in furtherance of positive and inclusive development of engineering community.
Recent events have highlighted that there are some people and entities that take an offensive (and I believe counter-productive and negative) approaches to these issues. See also Violet Blue's talk being cancelled due to the efforts by the Ada Initiative (registered nonprofit).
Please explain why jokes about penises are juvenile as compared to say...a joke about a paper airplane?
How about just talking about penises? You know, just a normal conversation out loud, in a train full of people...about our penises. Is that really juvenile...or something else?
(Or, you know, just downvote me because you don't like people questioning things that you accept to be true.)
This is a group with a noble cause trying to increase the frankly disgraceful percentage of women in technology. And you label them as discriminatory ?
Two things: #1, PyLadies is for everyone, as far as I can tell. So it's not discriminatory.
Now, if PyLadies was 'no men only,' it would absolutely be discriminatory: they're making a decision based on some kind of attribute. (It would also not be perpetuating 'sexism' since discrimination against men is not societaly re-enforced.)
The real question is 'is this bad?' I don't think that many people have a particular problem with discrimination when it's _for_ women or other minorities, especially when it's not at the _expense_ of everyone who's not within that group. A "women's only" programming group doesn't harm men in any way, yet helps women. I feel like this is the camp you may fall into. It is certainly the one I do.
Scala will easily dominate the JVM largely due to web use cases.
When you have companies like Twitter, LinkedIn, FourSquare behind it there is that air of credibility and longevity which companies look for when committing to a new technology. Plus the popularity of frameworks like Play doesn't hurt.
> Scala will easily dominate the JVM largely due to web use cases.
Not sure what you mean by that. The web situation on Scala is murky at best.
First, it looked like Lift was becoming the de-facto standard web framework on Scala (which doesn't mean much in comparison to web frameworks on other platforms such as Java).
Then Play switched to Scala and Typesafe decided to adopt it instead of Lift. Play 2 was (and still is) quite controversial because a lot of Play 1 users see the move to Scala as a step backward because templates take so long to compile right now.
The result is that the web landscape on Scala is heavily fragmented and while Play 2 seems to be the standard on it today, this does very little to support your point that "Scala will dominate the JVM largely due to web use cases".
Either way, Scala has been around for ten years and it still has a less than 5% mindshare on the JVM.
Clojure is more popular than Scala for web stuff, especially among the startup set. Clojure is increasingly popular for analytics and data-driven use-cases, partly due to Marz.
I work for an enterprise company (10K employees) and you are spot on.
Oracle will forever dominant HR, Payroll, SCM, Billing, FM etc type systems where more often than not they have custom software on top of it that has been built exclusively for Oracle. There is simply no good reason to switch. If anything the threat to Oracle will come from hosted apps e.g. Salesforce.
But what I've been seeing in our company is MongoDB dominating front end web apps and Datastax/Cassandra for more of the big data, analytics type workloads.
Oracle should be far more concerned with Amazon Web Services.
Big companies don't want to house large IT infrastructure anymore. It seems too costly in the long run and benefits are difficult to explain to the board.
Consequently, you already see companies moving what was before considered core infrastructure to the cloud and the trend is probably going to increase.
Deploying a VM on EC2 or Azure is easy, quick and cheap enough considering you don't have to house as many talents as before in the IT department. As companies move to cloud based services, they don't deal with databases anymore, the people providing the solution (we don't even talk about software anymore, that's the current level of abstraction) does. Problem is amongst the cloud based service providers, few are Oracle shop.
That's the reason Oracle is now trying to position itself in the cloud through acquisitions (like Nebula today). Unfortunately, they are a bit late to the game.
I'm not so sure. I've worked multiple places where they fully took advantage of big iron. Data from one department fuels three other departments, who in turn fuel parts of reports for six more. Could it be done with a series of ETL jobs to feed data around the organization? Possibly, but I wouldn't want to architect it.
Actually I suspect the reason Datastax is growing is less because of Cassandra but more because they are one of the only cohesive enterprise class database, analytics and search platforms around. Having Cassandra, Hadoop and Solr in a tightly coupled, well supported package is pretty compelling.
See an article about that would actually be compelling, instead of inspiring nerd rage when citing Datastax (founded in 2010) for the coming downfall of Oracle.
It's true that MySQL is ahead on the tickbox features here.
But the PostgreSQL team are doing their usual slow, stepwise refinement approach to implementing these features from the primitives and moving up. I expect that in a few versions they'll be at sufficient feature parity with MySQL on this front that anyone who cares enough is the sort of person who decides between Oracle RAC and Teradata.
While that will be good and I look forward to it, I will miss seeing you turn up in these threads like a bad penny.
And I will definitely miss the weekly "PostgreSQL is all you need and you're stupid to use anything else" threads.
My position is that there a lot of different products out there that cater for different needs and there is no "one size fits all" solution. I can scale Cassandra out to a hundred nodes in minutes on EC2 with no configuration changes. I also have queries in MongoDB that are literally 50x faster than on a SQL database.
> And I will definitely miss the weekly "PostgreSQL is all you need and you're stupid to use anything else" threads.
I think that for any case where you might be building a new system based on a relational backend, it's basically true (modulo local constraints like "we're an Oracle shop"). The chances that you will need to run a website that needs 100 Cassandra servers any time soon is ... well it's unlikely.
PostgreSQL is a stable, proven workhorse. That's why I like it. My point of view is that you should start with high safety and features and relax those constraints as circumstances demand.
Jacques, Taligent is a well known troll here - Two things you never talk against when Taligent is around - Apple and MongoDB. And he will start poisoning the threads. Just ignore him.
"In the beginning of Spotify, when load was lower, PostgreSQL was definitely the right tool for the job."
"Later came Postgres 9 and with it the excellent streaming replication and hot standby functionality. One of the most important database clusters at Spotify, the cluster that stores user credentials (for login), is a Postgres 9 cluster."
Hum, your link kind of defeat your point. That or I did not understand the point you were trying to make.
Twitter has none of that.